Last week I watched sixty senior leaders put on VR headsets, climb into virtual cockpits, and fly against each other for a place on a leaderboard. Three rounds, six flights, and a harder environment every time. Nobody in that group had done anything like it before, and I’m not sure many leadership teams anywhere have.
We built the day on what we know about how leaders learn, and it did what we designed it to do. It also went further than we expected. Growth like this usually happens slowly and out of sight. Here, it happened in a single afternoon, in the open, where the whole room could watch it: the struggle, the asking for help, the colleague who shows up beside you without being asked, and the leader who stops trying to look good and starts trying to get better.
Beginner’s mind, on purpose
In my last blog post, I wrote about System 1 and System 2 thinking: the fast, intuitive read we build from years of experience, and the slow, deliberate reasoning we have to choose to do. Senior leaders use both all day. But even their careful thinking runs on familiar ground. They already know which data matters, what a good answer looks like, and where the traps usually are. That is what makes experienced leaders so effective, and it is also what makes them so hard to teach. Nothing in a typical training room is unfamiliar enough to take that ground away.
A cockpit is unfamiliar. Unless you spend your weekends gaming, nobody walked in with much of an advantage, and the instincts that make these people excellent at their jobs were useless for the first five minutes. Creating that condition for a room full of experts was the point. The game was custom built for this group, with every round and every spike in difficulty designed to stretch them. When your pattern library doesn’t apply, you have to think, ask, watch, and try again. Round by round, that effort started becoming something closer to instinct. We watched the learning curve compress into a single afternoon.
The prep was the first test
Nobody flew without doing the work. Every leader received packages at their door, built an avatar, and completed a live training session before they were cleared to compete. The preparation wasn’t a hurdle in front of the experience. It was the first round of it.
One leader got his package last. He’d been away and it sat on his porch. He could have shown up and winged it. Instead, he asked for a last-minute training call and took the prep seriously, even at the eleventh hour. He finished third out of sixty.
My mind keeps coming back to him because the lesson is so unglamorous, and so measurable. The leaders who treated the training like a customer meeting flew like it. The ones who assumed they’d figure it out found out in round one. Don’t suffer in silence. Ask for help. Do the prep every single time, especially when it feels like you could just show up and figure it out.
Crashing out loud
Here is where it exceeded what we designed for. The headsets gave people something I have rarely seen on a video call: permission to not know how to do something. We made a point of celebrating crashes, and leaders leaned in. You’d hear it out loud: “I’m really struggling. I have no idea where I am.” From someone who leads hundreds of people, in front of peers, that’s a real admission.
Two things made it possible. The environment stripped out status. The title, the camera-ready framing, the confident voice — none of it survives an avatar. And since everyone looked a little silly, nobody was protecting an image. The headset also created presence. You could turn to the person beside you and talk, and it felt like being with people in a way Zoom has never managed.
Psychological safety is usually described as something a leader builds over months. Here, we watched it accelerate in an afternoon. Maybe it has less to do with time than we think, and more to do with design.
The wingmen
The camaraderie is the part I keep telling people about. These leaders came from different teams inside the same organization, and many of them rarely work side by side. The scoreboard was real, and it would have been easy to silently observe and focus on your own flights. Instead, when someone was struggling, a colleague from another team would hop over to their cockpit and coach them through it. When a headset glitched, a teammate appeared to fix it. When someone joined late, the room waited. When a round was going badly for one group, you could still hear them cheering for another. None of that was assigned.
Strengthening connections across the group was one of the goals we built the day around, and it’s the one that matters most beyond the afternoon. Relationships across teams are usually built slowly, one meeting and one favor at a time, and remote work has made even that harder. An afternoon of crashing, coaching, and cheering each other on did something a year of shared calendar invites rarely can. What the client noticed afterward wasn’t the technology. It was the energy: how fully people participated, how willing they were to be bad at something in front of each other, and how much closer the group felt by the end.
Pressure without fear
There was an edge in the room too. Each round got harder. The approach that worked in round one stopped working at higher speed, and round-one leaders were not always round-three leaders. But the pressure didn’t produce fear. It produced experiments.
Leaders tried a different line, sat beside the top pilot to study his technique, watched the race from a new vantage point, and adjusted between rounds. In the final round, the top pilots were flying against the highest score anyone had ever posted on the course, and they wanted it. That is the kind of pressure I want on any team I care about. It doesn’t make people hide. It makes resting on your laurels feel like a waste of a second chance.
What the goggles made visible
Nobody learned to lead by flying a jet. But everything around the jet required leadership, which is exactly what Riverbend builds experiences to do. Leaders don’t change because of a slide deck and a workbook. They change when they’re put in an experience they can’t coast through — one that gets into their hands and their gut, not just their notes. That’s been true in a rowing shell, and it was true in a cockpit. People remember what they felt.
The headset is the newest way we’ve found to do that, and the first one that works when everyone is in a different city. It puts a body in the room again and lets people fail somewhere safe, in front of colleagues, with another round built in. A remote meeting doesn’t have to feel static. It can be the most alive afternoon of someone’s quarter. One leader put it more simply on the way out: “I’ll remember that for the rest of my career.”
So here is my ask. The next time your leadership team gathers remotely, especially across functions that rarely work side by side, don’t default to the deck. Put them somewhere new together. The technology is ready, the design is proven, and the leaders who go through it come out different, and closer to each other.
If your team is ready to build that kind of capacity, we’d love to talk. Book a Discovery Call and let’s get started.